Bad History Rudely Noticed

The Rude Pundit noticed some faulty memory at work in the state of the union address and in some people's coverage of the audience reaction.

Let's get one thing straight right here, right now, for every right-wing fuck doll in the media who gets up in arms about how "rude" the Democrats were for shouting "No" when Bush stood up last night and said, "Fuck your Social Security. I piss on your retirement": From the Buffalo News on Bill Clinton's 1995 State of the Union speech: "At one point, Republicans even booed. About 20 of them left before Clinton finished talking." What did the Republicans boo for? Because Clinton dared to say that there were some things that government must do.

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Bush ended "his" speech with a quote from Franklin Roosevelt's 1937 Inaugural Address, where Roosevelt included the famous words of poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy, "Each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth." Of course, the Republicans are desperately trying to co-opt FDR to justify their destruction of his works. But one wonders if Bush has read the entirety of Roosevelt's Second Inaugural. See, because in the rest of it, Roosevelt said, "We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster." Huh. Just the thing that the Republicans booed when Clinton invoked such ideas in 1995.